This season, Meredith Vieira is grateful for the right job at the right time, her fabulous kids, her mom's Thanksgiving legacy — and even the tough times that strengthened her marriage.

"Sit here," Meredith Vieira says in that delicious butter-pecan scoop of a voice (serious shot through with sexy, the A student who's still up for mischief). She offers me one of two small, straight-backed chairs in her cluttered dressing room/office, pulls up the other — ignoring the big, comfy leather desk chair — and sits facing me, knee to knee. "This way we're on the same level."

It's a wet Friday in New York City, and the Today show has just wrapped. We're upstairs from NBC's Studio 1A in Rockefeller Center, where the show has been broadcast live since 1952. I congratulate Vieira on her one-year anniversary as coanchor. "I know," she says with a mock-tired groan. "Well, I didn't keel over and die." Another facet of Vieira's considerable charm is the ability to laugh at herself.

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After nine years of winning fans by being loosey-goosey and candid on the ABC morning talk show The View, Vieira did some marathon mulling when she was offered the opportunity to take Katie Couric's place on the Today team with Matt Lauer, Ann Curry, and Al Roker.

"I thought, I'll have to be careful with my personality — The View was anything goes, but this is the news division. I'm basically a night person, and those hours are daunting. Will I be able to pull this off?" With the essential blessing of her family — husband Richard Cohen, 59, a writer, and their three teenagers, Ben, 18, Gabe, 16, and Lily, 14 — and a little self-restraint, Vieira hasn't looked back.

There hasn't been time, for starters. "You sign up here, and time just go-go-goes," says Vieira, who turns 54 next month. As she speaks, one hand now and again drifts upward to run absently through her silky chestnut hair sparked with blond highlights. She's dressed somewhere between on-air attire and going-home clothes; still perfectly made up, she's wearing the kind of generic white cotton V-neck T-shirt we all sleep in, and dark pants.

"This is a phenomenal job, but when I leave here I don't have a glamorous life," she says. "My idea of heaven is puttering. I just want to be home." On her wrist is a gold bracelet that her family gave her the night before she started on Today. The single charm on a simple chain reads We are with you. Love, Richard, Ben, Gabe, and Lily. "I've only taken it off once — and it was a terrible day," Vieira says. "It's never coming off again."

Terrible days have been blessedly rare for her on the show. But glorious or difficult, all of them start at 3 a.m. "It's not so much the getting up, it's having to get up and bring something to the table every day," Vieira says. "The most difficult thing is to stay in the moment and be able to switch gears. One minute you're with Hillary Clinton or covering a mine disaster, the next minute you're baking a pie or talking to Kool & the Gang. It's like a roller coaster. It takes a lot out of you."

And puts a lot back in. "There have been moments that meant a lot to me," she says of her first year. "The Virginia Tech story was moving and humbling." Talking to people involved in April's tragedy, after a student on a shooting rampage killed 32 students and faculty and himself, touched her deeply.

On the lighter side, Vieira fulfilled a girlhood fantasy and became a Rockette at Radio City Music Hall for a day last November. "The people at NBC said to me, 'If there's something you've always dreamed of doing, you can do it here.' The next thing I knew, there I was onstage, just kicking my legs and having a great time. That was so neat. It was thrilling!

"One of the joys of this job is that you get to explore parts of yourself you'd never get a chance to express, and parts of the world you'd never get a chance to see," she says. Vieira has also traveled (with son Ben) to China, the prelude to her covering the Summer Olympics in Beijing. All this, and she's in her sixth year of hosting the syndicated version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. "It's a little bit mind-boggling," she concedes.

Now that her children are teenagers, Vieira believes, coanchoring Today is the right job at the right time. "I worried about the mornings without them. So I cried about it — that's my MO, I cry about everything — and the kids reminded me that I never made eggs for them anyway, and besides, we fight in the morning." Now she gives each sleeping child a kiss before she leaves, "as much just to check to see if they're in the bed."

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Vieira has recently returned from Scotland, where she interviewed J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books. I remark that Rowling seemed more vulnerable with Vieira than I'd seen her in other interviews. Vieira nods. "We really connected on a lot of levels. We have a similar sense of humor, and we're both moms. Her mother died of multiple sclerosis, and Richard has MS, so I brought her a copy of his memoir, Blindsided."

By the time Cohen and Vieira met in late 1982, he had already fallen in love with her voice. He happened to hear it earlier that year, he writes, over the audio speakers at CBS News headquarters in Manhattan, where he was a producer. "Whose voice is that?" he asked a colleague. Told she was a new correspondent based in Chicago, Cohen said, "I am going to marry that woman." He calls their initial encounter "contempt at first sight." Walking by Vieira's CBS Chicago office, he saw her lying on a couch watching Looney Tunes on TV. "Very impressive," he said. "A real journalist."

She swore at him, then criticized a news segment he produced. "I thought she was exceedingly attractive and had a big mouth, both highly acceptable qualities," Cohen recalls. The attraction was mutual. After a four-year courtship and some tough talk about the unknowns and what-ifs of MS — Cohen had been diagnosed with the disease at 25, before he met Vieira — they leaped. And they've been married for 21 years.

"He wasn't going to write a memoir," Vieira says about her husband's book. "He was going to write something more generic about the disease, but his editor convinced him to open up. It turned out to be a blessing — for him and for other people with MS. It validated their feelings, gave them a chance to open up."

Blindsided — brutal, vulnerable, optimistic — was a blessing for their family as well. "For a long time, Richard didn't want to talk about his illness," Vieira says. Denial can be both good and bad, she reflects. "Part of the denial was because of his work." He was afraid he wouldn't be hired if people knew. The disease has progressively robbed Cohen of his sight — he is now legally blind — turned his limbs numb, and compromised his balance, all of which interfered with his mobility. "When we moved to the suburbs, people would think he was drunk," Vieira says. "I always felt a certain amount of discomfort in not being open."

Things began to change when Ben was around 8. "He asked, 'Am I going to be like Dad? What's wrong with Daddy?'" Vieira started telling her son about the illness. "The next day I said to Richard, 'I think we should talk about it.'" That felt right to him, too, and the doors began to open, first to family and, slowly, to the public.

Vieira says the memoir has made their marriage stronger. "Whenever you have closed doors, you're on eggshells. You never know what you can say, what you can't say." When Vieira accompanies Cohen to his speaking engagements, people often tell her she seems so chipper. "I'm not always chipper," she insists. "I'm angry sometimes, and I think it's important to say that. It's hard sometimes. Harder mostly for Richard, but there are days when I'm angry for the family or for myself, when I think, Why do I have to do this? It's much better to get that out. And if Richard is extremely frustrated, it's better for him to get it out. Illness is a family affair."

Right now, Vieira's biggest family challenge is adjusting to Ben's departure for college. "He was already spending a lot of his time with his friends, and I feel we did a good job," she says, bravely mustering her reasonable, dry-eyed self. Trying to muster it, at least. "You're always preparing and preparing for them to leave," she says philosophically. Still trying. "We're really ready to let him go." Meltdown ahead. "Richard is really ready to let him go," she says, and preempts a potentially weepy moment with a laugh.

In general, she says, it's been harder for her than for Richard to give the kids freedom since they've become teenagers. "Especially with driving," she says, "which is the first big step in going away. In a way, having him leave for college was easier than having him learn to drive." Now she's giving lessons to Gabriel, who's just turned 16. "We're still in the parking lot stage," Vieira says. "Maybe we could stay there."

Her relationship with 14-year-old Lily is "really lovely," she says. "She's serious about stuff, on the shy side, and she has a head on her shoulders. She has Richard's gift for writing and she's interested in theater. She has a beautiful voice — we don't know how that happened." Vieira worries about whether her daughter will grow away from her — "because I went through that stage with my mom." The two of them talk openly and candidly. "She knows everything about me. My mom was part of an older generation. When I was at the age when I would get my first period, a Kotex box appeared in the mail with a pamphlet she'd written away for. So Lil and I have always talked. I'm hoping, as she gets older, we stay close."

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A fierce nurturing instinct and a healthy competitive drive seem to coexist comfortably in Vieira. Her consistent, rock-steady commitment to family has always, it seems, defined, if not trumped, her impressive accomplishments as a journalist. Illustrating the paradox that strength can be soft and softness strong, this is a woman at once stiff of spine and marshmallow of heart. "I'm a mother first," she says. "I didn't always know that, but when I was put to the test, I figured it out about myself."

In 1989, already a successful television journalist, Vieira was offered a job as a correspondent on 60 Minutes. Having mourned three miscarriages, she took then-4-month-old Ben to lunch with Don Hewitt, the show's creator and executive producer, and left with an agreement that she'd work part-time at home and part-time in the office, sometimes with Ben. That flexibility wouldn't last. When Vieira turned down an assignment that required flying (she was pregnant with Gabe), the chill at 60 Minutes grew frostier, and a line was drawn. In 1991, Vieira left, choosing family over fame until The View tapped her for its on-air ensemble in 1997.

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Perhaps because she has lived through public dissections of her own career choices, she's quick to defend Katie Couric, the subject of negative media scrutiny since taking over the CBS Evening News and failing to lift the show out of third place. "I think it's unfair to be put under the microscope the way she has, and I feel bad for her," Vieira says. "Things don't turn around overnight." Vieira says she knows how hard it is to move to a new job and get your feet planted. "There's a learning curve, and an acceptance curve, with everything. They hype and hype, then at the first sign of slippage, people start to write stories."

When I ask Vieira what she'd do if the time ever came when she wasn't a television journalist, she answers without hesitation, "I'd be a pediatric clown in the children's ward of a hospital." She did a segment about the profession on Today this year. "First, I observed the clowns in a hospital, and I thought, These kids are so sick, how do they do this? And one of the clowns said, 'When you put on the makeup, you're the clown doctor.'" For the segment, Meredith, in clown makeup and costume, became Dr. Ditsie (a childhood nickname). "I forgot I was talking to sick children, and I had the best time. It felt so good. I made a difference and I got something out of it."

What Vieira brings to the table — the one in her gracious suburban home near the Hudson River that's shared by kids and husband, dog Jasper, and two cats, Felipe and Sweet Pea — are qualities that were well and wisely loved into being around her parents' table in East Providence, RI. Her mother, a homemaker, and her father, a doctor, were both first-generation Portuguese Americans. Vieira's three brothers — 10 years, 5 years, and 14 months older than she — probably helped determine her description of herself as "more of a tomboy than the princessy girl."

The hardest thing about the upcoming holidays, she says, is not having her parents at the table to share them. Her dad died in 1987, at 82, and her mom in 2004, at 90. Vieira lights up talking about them. "I was raised Catholic, but my mom was a real feminist who didn't like the male-dominated hierarchy of the church," Vieira says proudly. "She was tough about it. She went to church and was a believer, but she didn't like the trappings."

Dinnertime conversation at the Vieira home was long and lively, about politics and her physician father's work. "My favorite thing was when my father was asked to testify in court on a murder case. 'If you came across a body like that, what would you think was the cause of death?' he'd ask me."

Although Vieira acknowledges that the holidays are stressful ("I'm always trying to outdo myself"), you feel her sincerity when she talks about how she considers Thanksgiving special. "There's a purity to it," she says. "It's only about gathering." That word, "gathering," comes up again when she talks about the Quaker girls' school she attended from the age of 2. (She's still friends with the same gang, and they get together once a year.) "Philosophically, I loved that idea of gathering together in silence, and then standing up and expressing your thoughts."

Vieira and her family spend the holiday with Richard's side of the family one year, hers the next. "We don't say any special grace; we talk about what we're thankful for," she says. Richard is Jewish, "though he doesn't follow any religion per se." He and the kids light the menorah at Hanukkah, and say the Hebrew candle-lighting blessings together. "I believe in God," says Meredith, "but I have spirituality, not a religion."

This year, Thanksgiving dinner is due to be at her house, the menu pretty much what it was when she was a girl. "My mom was a great cook. She believed in different china for every occasion. She'd be up really early preparing, with Daddy helping out, then we kids would get up around 8 and help. My dad's family would come, there was always touch football, and we'd watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade." (Vieira is expecting to host that very parade, for the second time, with Matt Lauer and Al Roker. "It's not mandatory," she says, "but I had such a great time last year!")

Turkey was the headliner at a Vieira Thanksgiving, of course. "My mom made a great stuffing and her gravy was the best. There were mashed potatoes and squash and cranberry sauce, the jellied and the other kind. We had yams, sometimes string beans, sometimes fresh peas. She made Portuguese sweet bread, which takes lots of time and which I never get exactly right, and she made a kale soup I don't even attempt. Rolls. Pumpkin and apple pie." One of Vieira's biggest regrets, she says, is that her mom's apple pie recipe got wet. "Now I can't read it — and she never measured anything. Gabe is the cook in our house. He always makes pumpkin pie."

The worst Thanksgiving? "We went to Richard's sister's house in Boston, and Gabe, who was 7, split open his knee playing soccer. I was so freaked out. I started taking pictures, just to take his mind off it. He ended up writing a story about it called '16 Stitches' and showing the pictures in class. That was one of the first times I thought, Something bad could happen. I'd never had a situation like that with one of the kids."

Appearing at Vieira's celebration this Thanksgiving, as they have for years, will be wooden figures, Pilgrims and Native Americans, that were a gift from her mother. "She gave them to me after we moved into our first home. Every year now, I put them on the table." Over time, she's added other decorations. "I can't help myself. My husband says, 'Oh, please — not another turkey!'" She spreads these ornaments around the house for the holiday. "And our guests — family and dear friends — usually spend the night, so I'll decorate the table for breakfast the next morning."

I'm picturing the Vieira-Cohen circle, gathering, along with its four-legged members — Jasper, "who would carry the two cats around in his mouth when they were small," and those cats, trying to fill the pawsteps of the beloved Spike, who died in December about 10 years ago. "I really lost it over Spike. She meant a lot to our family."

The cat died in Ben's arms. "I took Spike from him, and Richard found me on the couch the next morning. He said, 'The kids understood and went to bed, and you're still sitting here holding a dead cat.' We wrapped Spike in a beautiful scarf, and we had workmen dig a grave," Vieira recalls. "Nobody explained to them who the grave was for. They thought it was for Richard and made it way too big. We put 'Circle of Life' on, and danced around it, and everybody wrote something for Spike and put it in. I spent hours filling in that grave."

The Spike story is vintage Vieira: funny and moving, with a journalist's eye for detail and a mother's eye for italicizing a pivotal life lesson that the kids will remember. I'm trying to decide if I'd rather be her best friend or her child when I hear her use the words "roots and wings." I think she's back to her Thanksgiving menu, but no, the phrase turns out to be what parents are meant to give their children. "I can't take credit for it," she says. "We heard it when our kids started nursery school. It's bittersweet." And delicious, and healthy. Just the sort of recipe that works best for Meredith Vieira.